Transactional Game

I’m reading about transactional memory at the moment. I’m doing a presentation on it on Tuesday, so I don’t have much time to talk. I just wanted to write down this game idea before I forget:

I’m picturing a turn-based board game, but the idea could be generalized to many different strategy genres. Picture Chess or Go. You and your opponent take turns making moves as usual. However, you have “transactional control”. That is, you may start a transaction in which you can make a series of moves without your opponent knowing what you are doing. Differently from usual transactions, you can see what your opponent does in the mean time (unless he is also in a transaction, of course). You may commit any time you like and make your moves visible to your opponent. Here’s the kicker: if your opponent commits before you do, and his moves interfere with yours, your whole transaction gets rolled back, and it is as if you never did any of it. So it is good to use transactions to hide information, but if they get too long, then you are putting your position in the game at risk. It also encourages you to predict your opponent’s moves more, so that you can try to interfere with them.